Facebook trainers teaching virtual assistant to do their job

The built-in virtual assistant in Facebook’s Messenger app, called M, is being trained by contractors at the social media giant to help it decide on replying with the best possible answers to users. The Menlo Park-headquartered company has not revealed much about the capabilities of the virtual assistant, which is presently available only to a few hundred users in San Francisco. “Today we’re beginning to test a new service called M. M is a personal digital assistant inside of Messenger that completes tasks and finds information on your behalf. It’s powered by artificial intelligence that’s trained and supervised by people,” Facebook’s VP of messaging products, David Marcus said in a Facebook post. According to Quartz, BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz, who tested out M, found the virtual assistant impressive as it could…